2024-01-05 A Meditation on Lean

“8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” (Eph 2:8-10 ESV)

A rock, a pillar: the lean operation underway means actionable responsibility for each and every soldier. Each and every servant. Each and every principled stand. Each and every personal duty. We are duty-bound yet there is no higher echelons that will always be there to assure and to fill in what is lacking. Somehow, in lean fashion, our faith matters. Our sanity counts for something. Our repose and staunch watchtower comes with it our own guarantee, signature, a final resolve that it is entirely up to us to win this war, at least, aspects of it as they come down to us personally.

So much for yesteryear’s parents who always make things okay for their sons and daughters. So much for last season’s leaders who delegate and create an overall ambiance so healing, mesmerizing, yet no longer for us in our grown state needed. We were trusted. We were invested in. We were encouraged. In all these things we took grateful allowance, recognition, observation deck, unto what astonishing things even we are capable of: things of the spirit; things that are situated right at our actual level; things that cause buoyancy or ascendant personal cry and alarm and motivation and rallying of the troops. Today, we are rallying. Today, we are contagious, in love and in good form, surrounding the Call to Serve.

The Call to Serve means we rest or repose in the glad arms of our partners in the night watch and the day’s hours. You got this one? I’ll get the next one. But our dependency, our mutual complicity, our together synchronicity, is never a lazy passing of the buck, rather we—alarmed, at the ready, Called—are in a post-manic, post-subdued, post-depressed, action and consequence. Our actions bear lean consequences, no one else filling in whereupon we ourselves may have been found lacking. No matter, this is our Creation and War to win. It shapes itself around our persistent alarm and weeping pluck. We are plucky and jousting, jocular and heroic, if just this once we can rid the self of the ego and say, “If in anything I succeeded, that was Jesus working in me”.

Therefore stop testing the Father Above with nebulous doubts or bargaining away things valuable, yet things less valuable—we learn the hard way—than His fondness for our own decision-making and our own situated Presence. We are Present, so we can mourn the stupid years and cry over the utter shame or embarrassment or fault-found deeds past. Somehow God allowed us to err in order that we might know just how much is ours to win, to labor into, to surmount, to reach a velocity called Escape. We escape the perennial frustrations or harping upon the wrong things. We escape because today’s lean outfit and cohort, lean operation and labor, is servant unto untold gladness and Peace for each and every one of us.